Yes I have seen rebar, but that picture is not detailed enough to tell. Things are not always as they seem or first appear to be.
The fact is it is difficult to tell for certain from the photo, it's purely speculation - not fact.

Plus the notion that electrical wires are as inflexible as solid steel rebar is completely absurd on it's face!

Arrrggghhh well like I said before smith you either need glasses or a better moniter because on my 21" Sony it is perfectly clear what it is.

Electrical conduit that has just been involved in a massive building collapse is probably not even going to be there anymore. It's thin light and very flexible, do you see anything that is obviously conduit? No you don't you are just reaching....

I didn't say that, the conversation was about you saying that the appearance of the object in the photo was too rigid to be flexible electrical conduit. I simply pointed out that the conduit obviously has thick wire in it which would make in inflexible enough to take on that shape.
I never said it made it as strong as or the same as rebar, you're putting words into my mouth.

Originally posted by AgentSmith
I simply pointed out that the conduit obviously has thick wire in it which would make in inflexible enough to take on that shape.

That is far from obvious in fact it is false.

Electrical wire is not as thick and inflexible as rebar.

That notion is ridiculous.

Originally posted by ANOK


Electrical conduit that has just been involved in a massive building collapse is probably not even going to be there anymore. It's thin light and very flexible, do you see anything that is obviously conduit? No you don't you are just reaching....

Good point.

Everything that wasn't steel was completely pulverized to dust.

Everything.

I think our best bet here would be to find diagrams of the WTC floors showing where the electrical would be ran through each floor. I'm fairly certain that they would be bundled together and ran through the same place (at least between columns), and not spread out and ran in rows like you see between the core columns in that one image. I've never seen anything like that in a building. And I think I've even seen such images in the past, showing a typical floor plan and assigning numbers to describe the function of each closed area of the core, air vents, elevators, and all.

This is a great discussion, too. Even though there's disagreement, what's awesome is that we're all thinking critically here. Try to find another board anywhere, where you can have these discussions. It's great.

[edit on 21-5-2006 by bsbray11]

Originally posted by AgentSmith
I didn't say that, the conversation was about you saying that the appearance of the object in the photo was too rigid to be flexible electrical conduit. I simply pointed out that the conduit obviously has thick wire in it which would make in inflexible enough to take on that shape.
I never said it made it as strong as or the same as rebar, you're putting words into my mouth.

These guys come up with tons of great evidence, which obviously took a lot of time to gather, to support their claim of a concrete core and the best you can come up to argue against it is that electrical conduit can look like rebar. Genius. But the objects in the pictures are obviously not conduit, so why keep dragging this on and on?

To me it seems like a deliberate effort to sidetrack the issue, of which you've done a great job so far. Im a fencesitter on this whole deal, so Im not taking sides really. Just stuck out to me how a few of you fight tooth and nail to close open minds.

I found another pic of it, guys.





Now does that look like electrical conduit?

I'm sitting here, in frustration reading this thread, screaming REBAR! over and over. I'm sure there are many others too. I've seen plenty of it and it's pretty obvious seeing what's going on in this thread. Unbelievable.

Originally posted by AgentSmith
Can you see the ribbing in this electrical conduit?

FWIW, that is BX conduit. I don't know if that type of conduit is allowed in New York city.



The "shinyness" is a non issue since everything was covered with dust, caked on by subsequent rains,

Back to this picture:



I'm surprised none of you have figured this out yet.

Look at that picture again. Is it the corner of the core or the outside corner of the building?

That's right, it's the outside corner of the building. look at the distance between the columns and the orientation of the two corner columns. this is not the core.

Furthermore, based on the fact that there is a slab outside the building footprint, I would guess that those columns were originally below grade.


How does that relate to the core in the high-rise portion?



[edit on 21-5-2006 by HowardRoark]

Surely floor plans, construction plans, news articles, trade articles, and more, exist that can lay this issue to rest and end the speculation, i.e. were the WTC towers' core columns made of rebar-reinforced concrete and steel?

Did some group/agency gather, classify, conceal, or destroy all the telling information, documents, and books regarding the towers' construction and structural components? Surely the firm of architects who designed the towers have all that info in their archives and may be willing to make it public if they have not already done so!

The folks who did the clean-up would be able to tell whether there was rebar everywhere, as there appears to be. What have they said about this?

The items at issue are plainly rebar. There is bent rebar everywhere. Only someone who has never seen rebar up close or never worked with rebar would insist that those items cannot be identified as rebar. Before continuing to insist that these items are conduit rather than rebar, get off your computer chair, go outside, do some field work at a construction site and a demolition site, take some pictures, get some dirt under your clean and tender keyboard hugging fingernails, and report back after you've dirtied your hands.


[edit on 5/21/2006 by dubiousone]

The image below shows the 2 type cuts in the steel found at ground zero. Explosive shear on left, torch cut on right.



The first time I saw one of those square cut columns I got a weird feeling. After seeing the below I realized that the square cut columns were only part of the mystery. The other part is that the interior box columns were sheared on level lines!!!!! Green arrow indicates a row of interior box columns and yellow are various support structure for elevator landings, and mechanical equipment inside the core. Note the support structures inside the core are not square cut. The core was to the right of the interior box columns on left, and left of row on right. It detonated leaving only the interior box columns.



About a year ago I realized that near the end of the documentary a set of plates were mentioned that were located where the floor panels joined with the interior box columns. the videographers had been trying to piece together the exact assembly method, parts etc, for the floors. They had reels of 16mm and thousands of stills but not quite enough data to get the full picture. From some sub contactor providing parts they found a detail of the plates that surrounded the columns at each floor/column intersection. They were astounded to find that the plates were spec'd with tolerences of like 0.035 inches clearance from the finished columns. The videographers were experienced in construction and went to the PA and asked about the precision as related to the cost to the public. They were definitely trying to show the public where the money went. The PA was actually upset momentarily that the videographers had went around them to a contractor and gotten information the PA considered sensitive at the time of construction. When pressed for why the tolerences were so tight the PA said that the plates were intended to "index the columns to the floors more perfectly". There were reasons the narrative put forth to question this and the expense, then the matter was left alone.

About a year ago I made this graphic to describe what I had remembered as it could relate to a method to create explosive shear of the columns. An extreme cutting charge built into the floors. The perspective is looking at the core face, or the steel in front of it.



After a year I added a second plate because with only one plate, 1 edge of 2, from the cut edges remaining, would be very ragged. In a year of looking at column ends I never found one. Both edges were clean, square cut tempered steel. So I added a plate that sandwiches C4 and is cast in concrete, around the column. The containment and resulting collapsing plane of high pressure gasses would leave a cut exactly like we see. Examine the edge left by modern LS charges and you'll see the column end above is very similar.


[edit on 21-5-2006 by Christophera]

[edit on 21-5-2006 by Christophera]

Originally posted by AgentSmith
I love these images:

Beautifull picture AS.

That reall shows those buildings that would ventilate so well in a fire, when that happens the heat goes away. Also it shows the portions that are stronger than the others, these I do believe are the reason why the explosive squibs in only a few areas of the buildings. I always figured they used mostly thermite a large set of explosives at the base and extra explosives in the floors that have extra structure.

Originally posted by HowardRoark
You can clearly see the gyp-board planks.

Why is it gypsum they used Howard? I am sure you know. Put that stuff on a concrete and steel wall and you have firewall that works really well. Of course they are going to use gypsum, its great for fire barrier, better than drywall.

Look at that nice silhouette picture agent smitty put up there, open one side of that building and she becomes the ultimate heat-sink and will ventilate and cool quite considerably. When you see that blacksmoke in the video footage it means it is burning cool bubba before either building fell.

First thing we do on a high rise fire is hook a couple of pumpers up to the fire dept. hook ups. We then blast the sprinkler system with about 200 psi or more of water through as many 4 and a half inch inlets as the building has. Sprinkler heads go off from heat in a only the area they get about 150 degrees. This means the area of fire its very consentrated.

Any idea what 4-5 class A pumpers can squirt through some sprinkler heads? Just one sprinkler will knock you down.

You dont heat a local area of a building tht size to the point of failure. To much heat get drawn awy to the rest of the concrete and steel. The darn thing had heat ventilation before the F.D. even got there. Thats the best remedy we can do when we get onscene is ventilate the heat. That baby had some seriuos ventilation at 80 floors!! Nice and cool...

Heck after that fuel burned off I bet that sucker was just about to put itself out. In fact Battalion 7 said they needed just 2 lines to put it out. Most high rise fires need a few of whats called a master nozzle that is so powerfull they cannot be held by hand, it has to be mounted to something, like a ladder truck. Then you have a small army attacking it with 2 1/2 inch and 1 1/2 inch hoselines. When we say we need a hoseline, that always means 1 1/2 inch. We need to specifiy a 2 1/2. A friggin high rise fire that can be handled with 2 (1 1/2 inch) hoselines is not very hot, or big.

Something was really badly wrong on 9/11 Howard, and you know better.




[edit on 21-5-2006 by LoneGunMan]

Originally posted by LoneGunMan

Originally posted by HowardRoark
You can clearly see the gyp-board planks.

Why is it gypsum they used Howard? I am sure you know. Put that stuff on a concrete and steel wall and you have firewall that works really well. Of course they are going to use gypsum, its great for fire barrier, better than drywall.

Look at that nice silhouette picture agent smitty put up there, open one side of that building and she becomes the ultimate heat-sink and will ventilate and cool quite considerably. When you see that blacksmoke in the video footage it means it is burning cool bubba before either building fell.

Something was really badly wrong on 9/11 Howard, and you know better.

Lonegun,

Good to see a knowlegble person commenting on the non issue of fires.

Let me point out a few things about the towers and their tendencies to draft.

The silhouette images are somewhat deceptive as to how air will travel through them.



The floors had no free flowing passages between floors except through the core. Elevator shafts will draft well if doors at top and bottom are open and all the windows on the upper floor with open shaft doors open are opened/removed. Stair doors (3 per floor) have limited volume flow so won't move much air.

On WCT 1 I saw some windows were busted out on an adjacent face a few floors over the impact floor, so somebody trapped above was probably doing exactly what you suggest over zone of 4-5 floors to vent the smoke and make conditions for those over impact in the core better. The right engine went clean throught the concrete core and slammed against the inside of the opposite side perimeter walls. Fuel from the plane went down the cores elevator shafts in pretty good quantity with a certain mount of debris. Vapors built up and detonated sending a fuel blast out some open doors from elevator shafts on lower floors. The entire core was smoked out bad with small fires at various levels that burnt upward into the core.

Basically the heat applied to steel in the tower had no consequence whatsoever, just as you say. I have a hard time believing that more than a few floor beams were heated to a point where some strength was lost. The trussed floors sagged in that area and that is about all the structural damage from fire I saw. Certainly a few interior box columns outside the concrete core walls got hot, but they were probably 1 inch thick at that height and if more than 25 % of any column on any floor got hot enough to bend I'd be shocked. Of course 25% is not enough for the whole column to bend.





[edit on 21-5-2006 by Christophera]

I'm not an engineer but I'll lend my memory to this
(for what it's worth) ...

It's been a very long time .. but years and years ago I was in the
World Trade Center and took the tour to the top. The one big
image that stuck in my head was the elevator banks. And I seem
to remember they were in the middle of the building.

If my memory is correct and the elevator banks (tons and tons
of elevators) were in the middle ... then there couldn't be a
hard solid concrete core.

I could have a fuzzy memory on this as to where they were,
but I remember them to be in the center of the building.